TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Getting It Out of Our Systems (and the Systems Out of Us)

Gay activists are pretty happy with the Supreme Court’s decisions this week, but it was also a good
week for the multilayered federalist system.

When America’s in doubt (and especially, to my mind, when
even some libertarians are a bit
torn about how to handle things), punting to the states at least avoids
everyone having to fight viciously for one-size-fits-all,
centralized victory.Even when it
means Arizona enforcing immigration regs that may soon be obsolete or
California making extra-onerous climate regs, at least the state-by-state
method allows for some variation and experimentation (though individual property
rights remain my favorite sweeping, all-purpose systems-hack, of course).

Indeed, I very much look forward to (repeatedly-arrested but
unbowed) libertarian activist Adam
Kokesh’s planned fifty-state-capitols July
4 protests calling for all fifty states to secede simultaneously from Washington,
DC (replacing his less-ambitious, but potentially more-dangerous, earlier
plan for an armed DC pro-gun march that day).Diversity is strength, after all, and the mass-secession plan has the
Constitution and history on its side – instead of just anarchist/libertarian
theories that not all states or citizens would necessarily like.

Secession might prove the path of least resistance for those
who want to maximize resistance, so to speak – and, hey, it’s not like only
pro-slavery states can secede.Consider
the beneficial break-up of the USSR,
which may not have been as unlike us as we used to think.

•••

I’m happy to see the feds be gender-neutral on marriage and
at the same time to let states (outside the Ninth Circuit, presumably) keep
wrestling with the issue – though I keep hoping social conservatives will just
give up, I admit, since I don’t want these issues to keep splitting the
free-market portion of the electorate.

As the print record will show, I had hoped the rise of
(somewhat “conservative”) gay commitment ceremonies in the 90s might mollify
the social conservatives, then hoped the early-00s knocking down of sodomy laws
by the Supreme Court might get conservatives to give up on that stuff and just
stay focused on econ, then hoped some compromise would be reached on gay
marriage...though people keep fighting this battle, plainly, alienating various
potential GOP voters in the process.

(Even very-Christian Rand
Paul would pretty clearly like the issue to stay at the state level so he doesn’t have to touch it, and his aged dad was moving that way on the
issue by the time of his final presidential campaign, despite some
very-nearly-unlibertarian deviations on the issue earlier in his career.I watch Rand Paul’s delicate
libertarian/GOP/mainstream balancing act with almost as much tension as I did Nik Wallenda’s dizzying tetherless
tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon.)

•••

Being radical enough to get something big accomplished while
also seeming moderate enough not to be marginalized is a tricky game that
recurs in many contexts: As befits the climactic entry of this blog’s “Month of Systems,” I’m really talking
about the challenge of working within the system to drastically alter the
system.

Whether the topic is constitutionalism, philosophy, or
conflict-resolution in general, everyone tends to sense that appearing to be in
the “neutral” position is an easy route to victory-by-default (though any
pretense of neutrality is usually a bit phony).I was reminded of two thinkers I like who manage to sound
pragmatic/moderate and still have very radical implications, David Stockman and Jonathan Haidt, when I saw the former speak at a Reason event and
the latter in the audience for the talk, earlier this week.

And here’s hoping that a
feminist out there trusts me to be neutral-despite-some-radical-notions
when I moderate my planned July 9 onstage
Dionysium debate on evolutionary psychology (and the question of whether
gender roles are more determined by nature or nurture).We have our ev-psych/“nature” debater (Diana Fleischman) and will need to
finalize her feminist foe very soon, so by all means contact me if you want to be that feminist (we’re
very civil, really – civility and humor are also good defaults, after
all).

After that biological-systems-hacking debate (so to speak), August 12 will bring our econ-hacking
debate on Bitcoin, so join us (possibly even volunteering to be a debater)
for that, too.